Charter debate

Children at Isthmus Montessori Academy are educated under a model that emphasizes independence, community and respect for a child’s natural development.

Liana Lamont has two rambunctious young boys. The older one, not unlike other boys his age, has a hard time sitting still. When he was 5, Lamont enrolled him in kindergarten at Lapham Elementary. But it soon became clear that it was not an ideal spot for him.

“There was a lot of emphasis on stillness, on uniformity and conformity,” Lamont told the Madison school board at a Jan. 9 public hearing. “Everybody does the same activity at the same time.... It just wasn’t a fit.”

“We decided it was time to pull out when our teacher said, ‘We think it’s time to get your doctor involved,’” Lamont said. “There were a lot of [labels] being used, and the response to behavior issues was punishment. We didn’t want to start putting him in boxes, we didn’t want him to be left behind.”

Hoping for a better experience, the family enrolled him at Isthmus Montessori Academy (IMA) on Madison’s north side. Lamont says her son has blossomed at his new school.

“The grace and the courtesy that is central to the Montessori method have led to significant behavioral changes,” Lamont told the board. “We are not alone in having energetic, smart kids that don’t fit perfectly in the rigid public school curriculum.” She concluded by urging board members to make Isthmus Montessori a public option so that “other families can benefit from this flexible but rigorous method.”

Co-founders Melissa Droessler and Carrie Marlette have been working to make IMA the district’s next charter school and first public Montessori school. If accepted, the school would be tuition-free and open to anyone in the district.

But a significant roadblock has emerged. Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham announced Jan. 23 at the district’s operations work group meeting that she does not currently favor adding Isthmus Montessori to the district.

“I could not support moving forward with approving the proposal as is,” Cheatham told the board. “I believe that every line needs to meet expectations for us to set the school up for success.”

In order to ensure that charter schools succeed within the district, a rubric was created to evaluate new charter school proposals. When an administration committee reviewed IMA’s November 2016 proposal, they found it met expectations in all but four categories.

If the board decides to go against Cheatham’s recommendation and approves IMA, she suggests they require the school to provide new materials that address the areas that failed to meet expectations, as well as defer opening the school until the 2018-2019 school year.

“While there are only [four] areas that didn’t meet expectations, they are big areas,” Cheatham said to the board. “They are budget, they are enrollment, they are goal setting, and they are such fundamental areas for school success.”

Montessori schools emphasize independence, community and respect for a child’s natural psychological, physical and social development. The concept, which stresses self-directed learning, was developed more than a century ago.

The school is projected to have 223 students, from pre-K through ninth grade, in the 2017-18 school year. Its budget for that year is projected to be just under $1.4 million. It’s expected to run a surplus until the 2019-20 school year.

School employees — required to meet the district’s criteria for hire — would become district employees, including the academy’s principal, who would manage the day-to-day operations of the school. Founders of Isthmus Montessori, which is currently incorporated as a nonprofit, would be joined by family members of enrolling students, teachers and the community to form a new nonprofit governance council to govern the charter school in accordance with Madison policies, as well as local, state and federal laws and regulations.

School leaders have been working with the Madison school district since it opened in 2012 in hopes of joining the district.

For that to happen, the board now has to consider Cheatham’s recommendation alongside the outpouring of public support they heard at prior public meetings.

For Droessler, who was optimistic going into Monday’s meeting, Cheatham’s decision was a blow.

“It’s not easy for them to say no — I know that because they see the people coming in — and it’s not easy for them to say yes,” Droessler says. “It’s easy for them to waffle through a non-decision, and we would appreciate the bravery to say no. And they should be brave enough to say yes, but one of the two needs to happen.”

Before Cheatham announced her decision, board members had been questioning whether the evaluation process was too difficult.

“We set up charter applicants for a kind of Catch-22,” board member Ed Hughes said at the Jan. 23 meeting. “The fault lies not with IMA or any charter proposal, it’s the unrealistic premises we ask them to operate under.”

Board president James Howard questions whether the board should require that all categories in the “rubric” meet expectations, or just a majority. “I’d be really concerned if I looked at the rubric and there were a lot of ‘does not meet expectations,’” he says. Otherwise, he adds, “it just seems to me to be something that’s workable.”

Droessler and Marlette hope to prove that the district could benefit by offering a Montessori option.

“There’s all this concern that we can’t be trusted and we wouldn’t do the right thing, but we can be trusted, we can do the right thing,” Marlette says as she pulls Droessler in for a hug.